The wind sliced through Chicago like a knife as Mira stepped off the train. The city was louder, dirtier, and more alive than the small Midwestern town she’d fled a year ago. She tightened the belt of her thrifted trench coat and kept walking, eyes alert.
Mira was done waiting.
She’d grown up in Reddings, Iowa, a dot on the map with nothing but cornfields and secrets. She lived with her mother, a Jamaican librarian who believed in knowledge over instinct, and her father, an absent ghost of Irish descent. Mira had learned early how to be invisible and how to watch. That skill had kept her alive, and now, it would get her into The Reddings Order.
Most people had never heard of them. They weren’t on the internet, they weren’t in any books, but Mira had seen proof. A slip of parchment hidden in the wall of the old Reddings library, written in Latin and signed by an ancient seal. Her mother had dismissed it, called it nonsense. But Mira had followed the symbols, the strange dreams, the sudden deaths in their town, and she had found a door.
A man named Laird, she would soon find out, opened the door.
"You're early," he said, standing under a flickering alley lamp behind a recreation center that had long been shut down.
"I’m ready," she answered.
He looked her over—copper skin, dark curls pulled back tightly, eyes too hard for someone her age. “They don’t let people in just because they want it.”
She held his gaze. “I’ll earn it.”
He nodded once and stepped aside.
The Reddings Order wasn’t a cult. It was older. Founded by excommunicated scholars, mystics, and assassins who believed knowledge was the ultimate weapon, and that most people weren’t fit to wield it. They locked their secrets away, jealously, obsessively, as if each one were a crown jewel guarded for centuries.
Mira wanted in because she needed answers.
Her mother was dead. A heart attack, they said. But Mira had found the symbol carved into her scalp, the same symbol from the parchment. The same symbol on Laird’s ring.
The Order had taken her. Mira was sure of it.
For six months, she scrubbed blood from stone floors, copied ancient manuscripts, and memorized rules she wasn’t allowed to question. The Order’s compound was buried beneath Chicago’s bones—accessible only through a system of tunnels no city map ever recorded. There were dozens like her, recruits from all over the world. Some cracked under the pressure. Some simply vanished.
But Mira endured.
The training consumed her. And somewhere in that crucible, she was reforged.
The girl from Reddings who once wept in silence became a woman who asked nothing, trusted no one, and studied everything.
Finally, they gave her a mission.
Laird summoned her to the Scriptorium, where dusty tomes whispered their own language and the air always smelled of ash.
“You’ve trained well,” he said.
She didn’t respond. She didn’t have to. Nor did Laird wait for a response.
“There’s a man in New York. His name is Daniel Maynard. He used to be one of us. He’s stolen something. We want it back.”
Mira raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”
Laird smiled. “A page.”
That’s all he said.
In New York, Mira found herself in shadows again. A place she considered home. She tracked Maynard through dead ends and false leads until she found him in a bookstore that specialized in rare theology.
He was older than she expected, gray-streaked beard and eyes like dull glass.
“You’re from the Order,” he said, before she could even speak.
She hesitated.
“I know the look,” he added, chuckling. “Starvation in the soul. You think the secrets will feed you, the power will strengthen you. They won’t!”
He got louder. “But it will tear you apart like a ravaged beast. There will be no mercy for you once you know those secrets. There will be no saving. Because to have that power, you have to be willing to have nothing else.”
Mira pulled a blade from her sleeve. “Give me the page.”
Maynard didn’t move. He released a small chuckle under his breath. “It’s not what they told you it is.”
Through gritted teeth Mira said “They killed my mother.”
“No,” he said softly. “She left.”
Mira’s hand twitched.
“Your mother found out what the Order truly does. How they use people like you to protect knowledge no one should have. She tried to stop them.”
“You’re lying.”
He didn’t flinch. “She joined them once, just like you. Then she ran.”
That was impossible, Mira thought. Her mother was boring. Orderly. A woman of tea and Jane Austen.
“She never would never.”
Maynard’s eyes gleamed. “But you did. Was it not to gain something?”
Mira slightly shook her head as if her body was also rejecting the information this stranger was giving her about her mother. The revelation that she possibly didn’t know her mother that well after all may have caused a heavy ache to settle in her heart. However, Mira remained stoic.
Maynard continued, unaware of the turmoil Mira was currently dealing with in her head.
“Because she wanted to protect you. But now you’re one of them. Look in the mirror, kid, before it's too late for you as well.”
Mira lunged.
The blade sliced flesh.
Maynard fell.
She searched his jacket and found the page, wrapped in silk, inked in something darker than black. She didn’t recognize the language, but it moved. It pulsed.
She should have destroyed it.
But she didn’t.
As she kneeled over the man, she had an urge to finish him, but when she looked in his eyes, she didn’t see a man pleading for his life; she saw someone at peace.
So instead, Mira stood up and walked out with more questions than answers.
Back in Chicago, they welcomed her like a hero.
Laird placed a silver ring on her finger and called her Sister.
But the page didn’t leave her.
It whispered.
Mira started dreaming in symbols. She couldn’t sleep without seeing fire. Her mother’s face. Screams in languages she shouldn’t know.
This went on for days and then months, eventually lasting two years. But Mira’s will surpassed her desperation to quiet the noise; she had to get the answers, she needed to know.
Then, one night, wandering the halls as she waited for sleep to find her, she found the Vault.
Hidden behind a false wall in the catacombs, protected by three locks—one of which matched her new ring.
Inside were hundreds of pages. Bound people. Children crying in cages. A boy from her training cohort, lying still on a slab, his chest carved open, ink swirling on his heart.
Mira fell to her knees.
She’d gotten what she wanted.
She was one of them.
And it had cost her everything, just as the man said.
The next morning, Mira walked into the Council Chamber.
Laird looked up from a scroll.
“I saw the Vault,” she said.
He didn’t blink. “Then you understand.”
“I understand,” she said, voice hollow. “It makes so much sense why you prepare us the way you do. To weed out the weak.”
He stood proudly. “Why, yes. We have to protect the purpose. I am glad we chose you. I knew you were strong enough to handle the knowledge of the power we hold.”
Mira nodded as she walked closer.
“Let me show how strong I am.”
Then she threw the page into the fire.
The chamber shrieked. Not from voices, but from its very bones.
Cracks split the walls. Books wept ink. Candles burst with violent force.
Laird lunged, but Mira was faster. She stabbed his throat before he could speak a word to her.
“I’m done listening to what lies you believe to be truth.”
The fire roared, now green, then black.
She grabbed the rest of the cursed pages from her coat, ones she had stolen, one by one, and threw them in.
The room collapsed.
Mira crawled out through a tunnel she hadn’t used in months.
When she emerged, the sun was rising. Her skin was burned, her ring melted to ash.
She didn’t look back.
Later, she changed her name, dyed her hair, and moved to a city where no one had ever heard of Reddings, therefore transforming herself again.
But no matter how much she had changed about herself, at night, when the wind shifted just right, she swore she still heard the whispers.
She had destroyed the Order.
Though the Order lay in ruins, its knowledge remained embedded in her bones.
And knowledge always wanted something.
So she kept moving, never staying in one place too long.
Some called her a myth.
Others whispered about a woman who once burned a secret society to the ground and walked away smiling.
But Mira never smiled.
She just watched.
For there was no longer a reason to smile once you knew what she did or heard the whispers as she does. But now she understood the peace in the Maynard’s eyes.
He had broken free.
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Hi Maxine! Your story popped up as a suggestion in my critique circle and I am SO glad i read it!!
Im not sure how to describe this story, chilling? heroic? A shadowy undertone follows around your mc, but simultaneously an air of hopefulness. Optimism towards reaching a new city, finding answers, being accepted into the order, completing her first quest, and then DESTROYING all the evil she became sucked into!!! At the same time, through the use of a narrative past tense, I sense that Mira’s character arch remains similar at the beginning and the end of the story in some ways. She’s desperate, for answers and then closure, haunted by new memories.
Overall, this story was riveting!!! It was so perfectly paced for a short story, it didn’t bore me and kept me on my toes for a resolution throughout. You have some amazing and powerful lines, I can’t wait to see what else you write!
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Thank you so much for your kind words, Nicole! I truly appreciate your feedback. You have no idea how much it means to me to receive these kind words. We writers need the compliments sometimes, haha! Oh, and the pace has been a struggle of mine for quite some time, so that is awesome you found it to be perfectly paced. It's good to know that my efforts are not in vain.
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